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COSCO, the China Ocean Shipping Company, was founded in 1961 as a Chinese government agency. Its Guangzhou subsidiary bought a used British vessel, renamed it Guanghua and sent it on its maiden voyage to Jakarta in April 1961. After the U.S. and China resumed diplomatic relations, COSCO signed a 1979 agreement with the Lykes Brothers Steamship Company that opened commercial sea routes between the two countries, and that year it represented China in work with ITT to repair communication facilities in coastal cities. In 1981 it contracted with Pakistan's national tanker company to carry crude oil. Scrutiny followed. In 1991 the U.S. Federal Maritime Commission probed claims that China restricted U.S. flag carriers, in 1997 it looked at alleged underpricing but found too little evidence for a formal probe, and Senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer pressed for an investigation of COSCO's lease of a former naval base in Long Beach, California.

In August 1993 the cargo ship Yin He lost civilian GPS off Oman when the U.S. disabled it over alleged chemical weapons materials bound for Iran. After 24 days at sea, inspectors from China, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. signed a certification that none were aboard. That year the company became the China Ocean Shipping Group Company, spinning off Chimbusco and COSCO Logistics and using backdoor listings such as the February 1997 purchase of Hong Kong-listed Shun Shing Holdings. After 2008 it gradually acquired Greece's Port of Piraeus, which went from about 400,000 containers a year to nearly five million by 2018. A 2015 and 2016 merger with China Shipping Group formed China COSCO Shipping, and in 2022 it kept shipping to Russia as most carriers halted service.

• The Yin He's operators said the cargo was paper goods, hardware and machine parts.
• COSCO Pacific listed in Hong Kong in 1994, and the group held a 20 percent stake in Chong Hing Bank for a decade.
• In July 2009 the bulk carrier Full City lost engine power in a storm off Norway, ran aground and spilled about 200 tons of bunker fuel.
• The Full City was Panama-flagged and run from COSCO's Hong Kong division, a chain that complicated accountability.
• Today the fleet tops 1,100 ships carrying over 1.5 million TEUs and calling at more than a thousand ports.

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William J. Levitt was born in Brooklyn in 1907 to a second-generation Jewish immigrant family. His father, real estate attorney Abraham Levitt, founded Levitt & Sons in 1929, and William left NYU to run the business while his brother Alfred designed custom homes on Long Island. Service in the Navy Seabees taught him rapid construction, and a 1,600-home project in Norfolk, Virginia, built with traditional methods, still had unsold units in 1950. In Hempstead, Long Island, he broke house building into 27 repeatable steps, poured concrete slabs instead of digging basements, sent non-union crews with spray paint guns from lot to lot, bought lumber and appliances direct and built his own nail factory. At peak the firm finished a house every 11 minutes. An $8,000 home could cost a veteran about $400 up front, or $1 down in some promotions, and Time put him on its cover in 1950.

Levitt's communities barred Black buyers through restrictive covenants in the deeds. In 1957 a Jewish couple in his Pennsylvania development resold to the first Black family there, sparking unrest, and in 1963 his Bowie, Maryland, project drew civil rights protests. The NAACP and ACLU opposed him, the FHA threatened to withhold financing, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his Willingboro case. In July 1967 he sold Levitt & Sons to ITT for $92 million, about $62 million in stock, with a 10-year non-compete, and ITT sidelined him. Later ventures failed, the ITT shares he pledged for loans fell 90 percent, a 1978 Prince George's County subdivision drew more than 2,500 code violations in 122 homes, and he was accused of misappropriating millions from the Levitt Foundation. He died in Manhasset, New York, in January 1994.

• The firm built 17,000 homes in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, plus Willingboro, Bowie, Puerto Rico and France, more than 140,000 houses in all.
• By the late 1960s his fortune topped $100 million, with a 30-room Mill Neck estate and the 237-foot yacht La Belle Simone.
• At his earlier Strathmore development he initially used similar tactics to bar Jewish families.
• Prince George's County revoked his license to do business after the 1978 inspections.
• Time later named him one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century.

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Salomon Brothers was founded in 1910 by brothers Arthur, Herbert and Percy Salomon with clerk Ben Levy; the brothers descended from Haym Salomon, a primary financier of the American Revolution. For decades it was a quiet bond brokerage. Percy's son William Salomon became managing partner in 1963, and in 1967 the firm sponsored Muriel Siebert as the first woman to hold a trading license on the New York Stock Exchange floor. By 1975 it was a bulge bracket firm and, with Morgan Guaranty Trust, organized a $1 billion bond sale to rescue New York City from insolvency. In 1979 Morgan Stanley walked away from IBM's $1 billion debt offering rather than share billing, and Salomon took top billing with Merrill Lynch. John Gutfreund, in charge from 1978, made the firm public through a 1981 reverse merger with Phibro and moved it into proprietary trading, while Lewis Ranieri pioneered the mortgage-backed security.

The 41st-floor trading culture described by Michael Lewis was ruthless and enormously profitable. In 1987 the firm took municipal bond losses, Ranieri was forced out, and Revlon owner Ronald Perelman, backed by junk bond financing, sought a 14 percent stake, so Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway bought $700 million of preferred stock with two board seats. Between December 1990 and May 1991, trader Paul Mozer broke the Treasury's 35 percent auction limit with unauthorized bids in clients' names, and management knew for months without reporting it. Salomon paid a $190 million fine and set up a $100 million restitution fund, Mozer was sentenced to federal prison, and Gutfreund resigned in August 1991 and was barred by the SEC from running a brokerage. Buffett served as chairman and CEO before handing over to Deryck Maughan.

• Salomon pooled thousands of local home mortgages from across the U.S. and sold shares of the pools to global investors as bonds.
• Travelers Group bought Salomon for $9 billion in 1997, and the 1998 merger with Citicorp created Citigroup and Salomon Smith Barney.
• By 2003 the Salomon name was gone, replaced by Citigroup Global Markets.
• Former fixed income chief John Meriwether and economist Myron Scholes went on to Long-Term Capital Management, which collapsed in 1998.
• Former employees and executives later announced plans to revive Salomon Brothers as a full-service investment bank.

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The T-90 came out of a post-Soviet crisis. In 1992 Russia was fielding three incompatible tank families, the T-64, T-72 and T-80, on a collapsing budget. The T-80's gas turbine burned fuel at an unsustainable rate and the tank had suffered heavy losses in the First Chechen War, while the T-72 carried the image of televised losses in Middle Eastern wars. The Kartsev-Venediktov Design Bureau put the T-80's 1A45 fire control system into a T-72B hull, a hybrid called Object 188, and named it the T-90 to escape the T-72's reputation. Protection came in three layers: composite armor, Kontakt-5 or Relikt explosive reactive armor, and the Shtora-1 system, whose glowing infrared dazzlers confuse older guided missiles and which fires smoke when a targeting laser is detected. A three-person crew sits above a 22-round autoloader carousel, keeping the tank just 2.22 meters tall.

India kept the program alive. After Pakistan bought T-80UD tanks from Ukraine, India ordered hundreds of T-90s in 2001 and built them in Avadi as the Bhishma, stripping out the Shtora dazzlers and adding French Thales thermal imagers; it now operates more than 1,200 and has introduced the Bhishma Mark III with DRDO electronics. In Dagestan in 1999 one T-90 reportedly stayed in action after seven RPG hits, and in Syria in 2016 one survived a frontal TOW hit. In Ukraine after 2022, open source trackers documented more than 213 T-90s lost, over 150 of them the T-90M Proryv. Top-attack Javelin and NLAW missiles and roughly $500 FPV drones hit the thin roof above the ammunition carousel, producing the jack-in-the-box effect.

• In April 2023 a T-90A captured in the Kharkiv counteroffensive sat on a flatbed at a Louisiana truck stop, bound for a U.S. proving ground.
• Western tanks keep ammunition behind blast doors with blowout panels, a safety feature the T-90 traded for a lower silhouette.
• The Bhishma is named for an invincible guardian warrior of the Mahabharata.
• Crews report a "disco head" failure in which the turret spins uncontrollably.
• In late 2024 a destroyed T-90M was found with clay construction bricks in its reactive armor slots.

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Reader's Digest began with DeWitt and Lila Bell Wallace, who married in 1920 in Pleasantville, New York, and launched the magazine in 1922 from a Greenwich Village basement beneath an illegal speakeasy. With scissors and glue they condensed articles from other monthlies, and DeWitt persuaded publishers that the shorter versions were free advertising for the originals. The digest was about half the size of standard American magazines so it could slip into a coat pocket. The Wallaces hoped to net a few thousand dollars a year; by the end of the 1920s they had nearly 300,000 subscribers. A UK edition followed in the late 1930s, then dozens of editions in more than 20 languages, plus Braille and large print. A vocabulary feature began in 1945, and a 1952 article linking cigarettes to lung illness caused a temporary nationwide dip in cigarette sales.

The company turned its readers' trust into a mail-order business selling record collections and hardbound condensed books. Sweepstakes mailings in official-looking envelopes suggested recipients were already finalists and that buying might help them win. In the early 2000s dozens of U.S. state attorneys general alleged that elderly and vulnerable consumers were misled, and a settlement required do-not-contact lists and plain statements that purchases did not improve the odds. British regulators later reprimanded similar mailings. The parent company had gone public in 1990, and a 2007 leveraged buyout tripled annual interest payments to $148 million just as print was losing readers to the internet. It filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and again in 2013, the UK branch was sold to a venture capitalist for one pound, and the UK and Canadian editions ceased publication in 2024.

• By the mid-2000s the magazine reached more households earning over $100,000 than several major business and financial magazines combined.
• Its German publishing arm produced a 50-volume hardbound anthology of classic science fiction.
• Throughout the 20th century the magazine promoted a conservative, anti-communist editorial worldview.
• The original private equity investors were wiped out, and lenders took over the brand.
• The U.S. edition survives with reduced frequency and marketing built on nostalgia and shared family reading.

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Paytm was founded by Vijay Shekhar Sharma in August 2010 with an initial investment of $2 million, starting as a platform for prepaid mobile and satellite TV recharges in a cash-heavy India where topping up meant paying cash at a kiosk. The Paytm wallet launched in January 2014, and adoption by Uber and Indian Railways made it everyday infrastructure: it let a cash economy pay for rides without credit cards and let travelers skip the IRCTC site's timing-out bank gateway. Alibaba Group and Ant Financial took a 40 percent stake in 2015, and Berkshire Hathaway invested $356 million in 2018. Paytm added Paytm Money for wealth management, bought Insider.in and TicketNew, launched Paytm First Games and pushed QR codes onto tea stalls and storefronts. In 2019 it introduced the Paytm Soundbox, a speaker that announces each payment aloud so vendors do not have to check their phones.

The November 2021 IPO raised roughly $1.9 billion at a $20 billion valuation, the largest in Indian history at the time, but shares opened 9.3 percent below target and fell more than 27 percent by the end of the first day. Regulators then closed in. In March 2022 the Reserve Bank of India barred Paytm Payments Bank from signing up new customers, citing data leaks to Chinese entities with indirect stakes in the company. In January 2024 the RBI halted bulk activities over failures in background checks on the source of funds. In August 2024 Paytm sold its entertainment ticketing business to Zomato for about $244 million, and on April 24, 2026, the RBI canceled the license of Paytm Payments Bank Limited.

• Uber needed a way to keep its cashless model in a market with low credit card penetration, and the Paytm wallet filled that gap.
• Paytm's fraud detection system originated in its R&D lab in Canada.
• By 2026 its AI router redirected payment traffic away from overloaded bank servers in milliseconds.
• A 2018 Cobrapost undercover video showed a Paytm vice president claiming Jammu and Kashmir user data had been shared with the government at the prime minister's office's request.
• Paytm denied the Cobrapost claim, saying no data was shared with third parties or law enforcement without proper authorization.

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Motorola began in 1928 in Chicago as the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation, founded by brothers Paul and Joseph Galvin. Its first product was a battery eliminator that let radios built for direct current run from new household AC outlets instead of leaky acid batteries. In 1930 it sold its first car radio for $30 to a customer in Indiana and began equipping police cars in Evanston and Cook County. Paul Galvin coined the brand by adding "ola" to "motor," and the company became Motorola Inc. in 1947. World War II brought the SCR-536 handheld radio and research director Dan Noble, and in 1969 a Motorola transceiver carried Neil Armstrong's voice from the Moon. In 1974 it sold its television business to Panasonic's parent to focus on chips, and its 32-bit MC68000 processor powered machines from Apple, Commodore, Atari, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard.

Martin Cooper made the first handheld mobile phone call in New York in 1973, and the DynaTAC 8000X won FCC approval in 1983. By 1998 phones were two-thirds of revenue, yet Motorola clung to analog while Europe moved to digital GSM, falling behind Ericsson in 1996 and Nokia in 1998. Its StarMax Mac clone died when Steve Jobs released Mac OS 8, sidestepping licenses written for System 7, and the 66-satellite Iridium project drained billions. The RAZR and the "Hello Moto" campaign brought a mid-2000s revival, but after the iPhone Motorola lost $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009 as engineers left for Apple. On January 4, 2011, it split into Motorola Solutions and Motorola Mobility, which Google bought in 2012 and sold to Lenovo in 2014.

• A heated call between Steve Jobs and CEO Christopher Galvin ended the clone contract, and Apple demoted Motorola from favored processor supplier.
• Apple and IBM pushed Motorola out of a major processor manufacturing alliance for a time after the clone fight.
• The 1955 batwing M logo is built from a sine wave and a triangle wave, a drawing of a radio signal.
• In Scottsdale, Arizona, Motorola and a local water company were identified as sources of TCE contamination that brought a three-day water ban for almost 5,000 people.
• By 2010 Greenpeace ranked Motorola highly for cutting PVC, and it made phone housings from recycled water cooler bottles.

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Michael Milken's rise ran through Drexel Burnham Lambert, a firm that began in 1935 when I.W. "Tubby" Burnham opened a small New York retail brokerage with $100,000 in capital, $96,000 of it borrowed from his grandfather, a Kentucky distillery founder. Classed as a "sub major" firm and shut out of Wall Street's elite underwriting syndicates, Burnham bought pedigree in 1973 by merging with Drexel Firestone of Philadelphia, a house dating to 1838, and put the Drexel name first. Fred Joseph, the son of a Boston cab driver, promised to make the firm as powerful as Goldman Sachs, and the engine was Milken in Beverly Hills. He built the high yield, or junk bond, market from scratch, cultivated a loyal network of insurers, savings and loans and mutual funds, and armed raiders such as T. Boone Pickens and Carl Icahn with "highly confident" letters. In 1986 Drexel earned $545.5 million, then the most profitable year in Wall Street history, and in 1987 Milken was paid $550 million.

The fall began when Drexel M&A banker Dennis Levine was caught insider trading and pointed to arbitrageur Ivan Boesky, who pointed to Milken. U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani threatened Drexel with a RICO indictment and a $1 billion performance bond at a firm whose capital was 96 percent borrowed. Days before a grand jury vote, Drexel's lawyers found MacPherson Partners, a secret partnership holding Storer Broadcasting warrants whose partners included Milken's children and outside mutual fund managers. Drexel took an Alford plea to six felonies, agreed to a $650 million fine and forced Milken out. As the junk market contracted and Drexel posted its first operating loss in 54 years, Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady refused a bailout, and on February 13, 1990, Drexel filed for Chapter 11, the first Wall Street firm forced into bankruptcy since the Great Depression.

• The government alleged that a $5.3 million payment from Boesky to Drexel, labeled a consulting fee, was Milken's cut of disguised trading profits.
• Milken refused to cooperate with Drexel's internal investigators and communicated only through his defense lawyers.
• Drexel had no firmwide bonus pool, so its divisions competed with one another like rival companies.
• Brady had chaired Dillon Read, which advised Unocal when it was attacked by a Drexel-financed raider.
• Milken served nearly two years in federal prison for securities fraud, turned to medical research philanthropy and received a presidential pardon in 2020.

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Merrill Lynch began on January 6, 1914, when Charles E. Merrill opened his firm on Wall Street; his friend Edmund C. Lynch joined months later, and by 1915 it was Merrill, Lynch & Co., a comma kept until 1938. Merrill believed in everyday consumer commerce: the firm bought Pathé, later RKO Pictures, in 1921 and took control of Safeway in 1926, building it into the third largest U.S. grocery chain. In 1930 it spun its retail brokerage off to E.A. Pierce & Co., which by 1938 ran a private network of over 23,000 miles of telegraph wire. Mergers in 1940 and 1941 reunited Pierce, Cassatt & Co. and Fenner & Beane with Merrill Lynch, and in 1941 it became the first Wall Street firm to publish an annual report.

Renamed Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith in 1958, it became the world's largest securities firm, selling through thousands of salaried advisors nicknamed the thundering herd. Scandals followed its push into institutional finance: a $400 million Orange County bankruptcy settlement in 1998, a $100 million settlement over analyst Henry Blodget, and the Enron Nigerian barge case, in which executives' convictions were overturned on appeal. From 2003, under Christopher Ricciardi, it pushed into CDOs, bought subprime lender First Franklin for $1.3 billion in 2006, and underwrote $93 billion of CDOs in 2006 and 2007 while holding toxic tranches itself. After an $8.4 billion write-down in November 2007 and $19.2 billion in losses over a year, Bank of America agreed to buy it for $50 billion on September 14, 2008.

• Merrill Lynch was known as the Catholic firm of Wall Street, run largely by Irish Catholic executives.
• It became the second largest shareholder in Japanese anime studio TMS Entertainment.
• The Enron barge deal let Enron book $12 million in pre-tax profit through an alleged secret buyback guarantee.
• A 2013 settlement of $160 million resolved a 2005 class action by Black brokers, filed while Stanley O'Neal was CEO.
• Executives set aside $3.6 billion in bonuses just before the sale, and in 2019 several businesses were rebranded simply as Merrill.

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Morgan Stanley exists because of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, which forced banks to choose between commercial and investment banking. J.P. Morgan & Co. kept commercial banking, and Henry Sturgis Morgan, J.P. Morgan's grandson, and Harold Stanley opened Morgan Stanley at 2 Wall Street on September 16, 1935. It took a 24 percent market share in its first year, with $1.1 billion in public offerings and private placements, and in 1938 led a $100 million debenture distribution for U.S. Steel. In 1962 Dick Fisher, later chairman, helped create the first viable computer model for financial analysis. In 1997 it merged with Dean Witter Discover, the retail business spun off from Sears, with Dean Witter's Philip Purcell as CEO and John Mack as COO.

On September 11, 2001, Morgan Stanley was the largest tenant of the World Trade Center; security director Rick Rescorla's evacuation plan got 2,687 employees out, and 13, including Rescorla, died. In 2005 former partners ousted Purcell, who had resisted subprime mortgages, and the firm moved into that market as it began to collapse. It took $5 billion from China Investment Corporation in December 2007, lost over 80 percent of its market value, became a bank holding company on September 22, 2008, and borrowed over $107 billion from the Fed. Over Columbus Day weekend, with U.S. wire systems shut, Japan's MUFG delivered a $9 billion investment as a paper check handed to Robert A. Kindler at Wachtell Lipton.

• Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson offered Morgan Stanley to JPMorgan Chase for free, and Jamie Dimon turned it down.
• Employee donations helped build the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital at New York Presbyterian, opened in 2003.
• After 2008 it built wealth management through Smith Barney, the $13 billion E-Trade deal in 2020 and Eaton Vance, reaching $5.4 trillion in client assets.
• It paid $3.2 billion in 2016 over subprime mortgage bonds and agreed to a $249 million settlement in 2024 over block trade disclosures.
• Fines of over $41 million in 2022 and 2023 followed its failure to wipe decommissioned servers holding data on 15 million customers.